1. 1. On Trying Too Hard to be Happy

1.1. Aldous Huxley

1.1.1. 'The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed'.

1.2. "The Negative Path"

1.2.1. Stoicism

1.2.2. Buddhism

1.2.3. memento mori

1.2.4. Eckart Tolle

1.2.5. Alan Watts

1.2.5.1. "The law of reversed effort"

1.3. John Stuart Mill

1.3.1. 'Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so'

1.4. Daniel Wegner

1.4.1. "Ironic Process Theory"

1.4.1.1. Fyodor Dostoievsky

1.4.1.1.1. Can you succeed in NOT thinking about a white bear for one whole minute?

1.4.2. "The Precisely Counterintuitive Error"

1.4.2.1. Edgar Allan Poe

1.4.2.1.1. 'The imp of the perverse'

1.4.3. "Metacognition"

1.4.3.1. 'Metathoughts are instructions we give ourselves about our object-level thinking, and sometimes we just can't follow our own instructions.'

1.5. Émile Coué

1.5.1. "Affirmations"

1.5.1.1. Joanne Wood

1.5.1.1.1. "Self-comparison Theory"

1.5.2. 'Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better'

1.6. "Positive Thinking"

1.6.1. Barbara Ehrenreich

1.6.1.1. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America

1.6.1.1.1. "New Thought" vs. "American Calvinism"

1.6.2. George W. Bush

1.6.2.1. Unfalsifiable ideology of positivity at all costs - positivity regardless of the results.

1.6.3. Mikhail Gorbachev

1.6.4. Rudy Giuliani

1.6.5. Colin Powell

1.6.6. William Shatner

1.6.7. Dr. Robert H. Schuller

1.6.7.1. Get Motivated!

1.6.7.1.1. Tamara Lowe

1.6.7.2. Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking

1.6.7.3. Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do!

1.6.8. Self-help books

1.6.8.1. Fish!

1.6.8.2. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

1.6.8.3. How to Win Friends and Influence People

1.7. Steven Hayes

1.7.1. "Chinese Finger Trap"

2. 5. Who's there?

2.1. Eckart Tolle

2.1.1. The Power of Now

2.1.2. A New Earth

2.1.2.1. "Ego"

2.2. "Buddhism"

2.3. Aldous Huxley

2.3.1. "The perennial philosophy"

2.4. René Descartes

2.4.1. Cogito ergo sum

2.4.2. "Systematic doubt"

2.4.2.1. The Matrix (1999)

2.5. Christopher Grau

2.6. Pierre Gassendi

2.7. Georg Lichtenberg

2.8. David Hume

2.9. Paul Broks

2.10. Michael Gazzaniga

2.11. Julian Baggini

2.12. Alan Watts

2.12.1. "Packages of skin"

2.12.1.1. 'Self'

3. 6. The Safety Catch

3.1. Bruce Schneier

3.1.1. 'Security is both a feeling and a reality'

3.2. Alan Watts

3.2.1. The Wisdom of Insecurity

3.3. Hal and Sidra Stone

3.4. Brené Brown

3.4.1. 'You can't selectively numb emotion'

3.5. C. S. Lewis

3.5.1. 'To love at all is to be vulnerable'

3.6. Thomas Merton

3.6.1. The Seven Storey Mountain

3.7. Pema Chödrön

3.7.1. 'Insecurity is the essential nature of reality'

3.7.2. When Things Fall Apart

3.8. Heraclitus

3.8.1. 'No man steps in the same river twice'

3.9. Confucius

3.9.1. 'It is always flowing, day and night'

4. 7. The Museum of Failure

4.1. Paul Ormerod

4.1.1. Why Most Things Fail

4.2. Kevin Dunbar

4.2.1. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)

4.2.1.1. "Confirmation bias"

4.3. Robert McMath

4.3.1. What Were They Thinking?

4.4. Jerker Denrell

4.4.1. "Survivor bias" or "Undersampling of failure"

4.5. Stephen Pile

4.5.1. The Book of Heroic Failures

4.6. Christopher Kayes

4.6.1. "Goalodocity"

4.7. "Perfectionism"

4.8. Carol Dweck

4.8.1. "Fixed Theory" of success

4.8.1.1. ability is innate

4.8.2. "Incremental Theory" of success

4.8.2.1. ability evolves through challenge and hard work

4.9. Scott Sandage

4.9.1. Born Losers

4.10. Natalie Goldberg

4.11. J. K. Rowling

5. 2. What Would Seneca Do?

5.1. Albert Ellis

5.1.1. How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, Yes, Anything!

5.1.2. "Habit of Musturbation"

5.1.3. 'The worst thing about any event, is usually your exaggerated belief in its horror'

5.2. Stoicism

5.2.1. Zeno of Citium

5.2.1.1. Epictetus

5.2.1.2. Seneca

5.2.1.2.1. 'Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to be at peace. All her generous bounties -money, office, influence- I deposited where she could ask for them back without disturbing me'

5.2.1.2.2. Letters from a Stoic

5.2.1.3. Marcus Aurelius

5.2.1.3.1. 'Our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within'

5.2.2. "Inner Tranquility"

5.2.3. "The Premeditation of Evils"

5.3. Norman Vincent Peale

5.3.1. The Power of Positive Thinking

5.4. "Positive Visualization"

5.4.1. "Law of Attraction"

5.5. Tali Sharot

5.5.1. The Optimism Bias

5.6. Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues

5.7. Diogenes Laertius

5.7.1. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

5.8. "Hedonic Adaptation"

6. 3. The Storm before The Calm

6.1. Paul Wilson

6.1.1. The Calm Technique

6.1.2. Instant Calm

6.1.3. The Little Book of Calm

6.1.4. The Big Book of Calm

6.1.5. Calm at Work

6.1.6. Calm Mother

6.1.7. Calm Child

6.1.8. The Complete Book of Calm

6.1.9. Calm for Life

6.2. "Meditation"

6.2.1. Non-attachment

6.3. "Attachment"

6.4. Barry Magid

6.4.1. Ending The Pursuit of Happiness

6.4.2. Oedipus

6.4.2.1. 'struggling to escape your demons is what gives them their power'

6.4.3. "Backward Law"

6.5. Pema Chödron

6.5.1. 'Relaxing into the groundlessness of our situation'

6.6. Jiddu Krishnamurti

6.7. Steve Hagen

6.7.1. Meditation: Now or Never

6.8. Buddhism

6.8.1. Abhidhamma

6.8.2. Buddhism vs. Stoicism

6.9. Fadel Zeidan

6.9.1. "Meditation"

6.10. "Vipassana vendetta"

6.11. "Procrastination"

6.11.1. Tony Robbins

6.11.1.1. Awaken The Giant Within

6.11.2. "Non-attached" stance

6.11.2.1. Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it?

6.11.3. Shoma Morita

6.11.3.1. 'People . . . think that they should always like what they do, and that their lives should be trouble-free. Consequently, their mental energy is wasted by their impossible attempts to avoid feelings of displeasure or boredom.'

6.11.4. James Hill

6.11.4.1. 'Our life experience teaches that it is not necessary to change our feelings in order to take action . . . Once we learn to accept our feelings, we find that we can take action without changing our feeling-states'.

6.12. "Knowledge of cause and effect"

6.13. Seung Sahn

6.13.1. 'Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky'

7. 4. Goal Crazy

8. 8. Memento Mori

8.1. Muriel Spark

8.1.1. Memento Mori

8.2. Mahabharata

8.3. Daniel Wegner

8.3.1. "White bear challenge"

8.4. Freud

8.4.1. 'No one believes in his own death'

8.5. Woody Allen

8.5.1. Love and Death

8.6. Ernest Becker

8.6.1. The Denial of Death

8.6.1.1. "The physical self"

8.6.1.2. "The symbolic self"

8.6.1.3. "Immortality projects"

8.6.1.3.1. War

8.6.2. "Terror Management Theory"

8.7. Lauren Tillinghast

8.8. Epicurus

8.8.1. 'Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not'

8.8.2. "The argument of symmetry"

8.9. Einstein

8.9.1. 'The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident to one who's dead.'